Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature

By Rebecca L. Walkowitz

As a growing number of contemporary novelists write explicitly for publication in multiple languages, the genre's form and aims are shifting. Born-translated novels include passages that appear to be written in different tongues, narrators who speak to foreign audiences, and other visual and formal techniques that treat translation as a medium rather than an afterthought. These strategies challenge the global dominance of English, complicate "native" readership, and protect creative works against misinterpretation as they circulate. They have also given rise to a new form of writing that confounds traditional models of literary history and political community.

Born Translated builds a much-needed framework for reading translation's effect on fictional works, as well as digital art, avant-garde magazines, literary anthologies, and visual media. Artists and novelists discussed include J. M. Coetzee, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jamaica Kincaid, Ben Lerner, China Miéville, David Mitchell, Walter Mosley, Caryl Phillips, Adam Thirlwell, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, and Amy Waldman. The book understands that contemporary literature begins at once in many places, engaging in a new type of social embeddedness and political solidarity. It recasts literary history as a series of convergences and departures and, by elevating the status of "born-translated" works, redefines common conceptions of author, reader, and nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780231539456

Book preview

BORN TRANSLATED

Literature Now

LITERATURE NOW

Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors

Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures.

Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel

Rebecca L. Walkowitz

BORN TRANSLATED

The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53945-6

Portions of the Introduction and chapter 1 previously appeared under the title Comparison Literature, in New Literary History 40, no. 3, pp. 567–82. Copyright 2009, New Literary History; reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. An earlier version of chapter 2 previously appeared under the title of Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature, in Novel 40, no. 3, pp. 216–39. Copyright 2007, Novel; reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. A portion of chapter 3 previously appeared under the title The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer, in Contemporary Literature 47, no. 4, pp. 527–45. Copyright 2007, Contemporary Literature; reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Chapter 3 also includes material that appeared under the title Building Character, in the online review Public Books (March 2012). An earlier version of chapter 5 previously appeared under the title of Close Reading in an Age of Global Writing, in Modern Language Quarterly 74, no. 2, pp. 171–95. Copyright 2013, Modern Language Quarterly; reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 1970–

Born translated : the contemporary novel in an age of world literature / Rebecca L. Walkowitz.

pages cm. — (Literature now)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16594-5 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53945-6 (ebook)

1. Literature—Translations—History and criticism. 2. Fiction—Translations—History and criticism. 3. Translating and interpreting. I. Title.

PN241.W35 2015

418'.04—dc23

2014036138

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

COVER DESIGN: Diane Luger

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Henry and Lucy

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: THEORY OF WORLD LITERATURE NOW

1 CLOSE READING AT A DISTANCE

2 THE SERIES, THE LIST, AND THE CLONE

3 SAMPLING, COLLATING, AND COUNTING

4 THIS IS NOT YOUR LANGUAGE

5 BORN TRANSLATED AND BORN DIGITAL

EPILOGUE: MULTIPLES

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IAM DELIGHTED to be able to thank the many individuals and collectives that helped me research and write this book. Funding from the Center for European Studies, the Graduate School, and the Vilas Trust at the University of Wisconsin–Madison was vital to the development of the project. Most of the chapters were written with the generous support of the National Humanities Center, where I held the Hurford Family Fellowship in 2010–2011, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where I held the Walter Jackson Bate Fellowship in World Literature in 2012–2013. I am also grateful for a year-long sabbatical awarded by Rutgers University, which allowed me to complete the manuscript in 2013–2014.

I want to acknowledge, with profound thanks, my colleagues at Wisconsin and Rutgers, who have supported my work on campus and my work away from campus in equal measure. I am also very grateful to the staff and administration of the National Humanities Center and the Radcliffe Institute for nourishing academic research in the humanities, and for creating such stimulating and warm environments for thinking and writing. My sincere thanks to my fellow fellows on both occasions, especially Daisy Hay, Katherine Ibbett, Margot Livesey, Feryal Özel, Renée Poznanski, Eliza Richards, Douglas Rogers, and Hilary Schor, whose rare accomplishments and good cheer made me want to think harder and write better.

An enormous number of readers and listeners have enriched this project in small and large ways. Several dear friends and colleagues were willing to talk to me about translation and world literature on many, many occasions, and their readings of multiple chapters and parts of chapters have been invaluable. It gives me great pleasure to thank Amanda Claybaugh, Lee Edelman, Susan Stanford Friedman, Eric Hayot, Caroline Levine, Joseph Litvak, Sharon Marcus, Martin Puchner, Gayle Rogers, and Henry Turner. I am deeply grateful for their friendship and their intellectual generosity. Jed Esty, John Marx, and Paul Saint-Amour have been loyal comrades in the fields of contemporary literature, modernism, and the anglophone novel. At conferences and colloquia far and wide, they have asked probing as well as practical questions. My thanks to them for reminding me to think about the delivery of the argument as well as the argument.

Timely suggestions have also come from Nancy Armstrong, Timothy Bewes, Christopher Bush, Sarah Cole, Guillermina De Ferrari, Marianne DeKoven, Vinay Dharwadker, Rita Felski, Lynn Festa, Lisa Fluet, Marjorie Garber, Jane Gallop, Sara Guyer, Matthew Hart, Gil Harris, Nico Israel, John Kucich, David Kurnick, David James, Priya Joshi, Michael LeMahieu, Jacques Lezra, Pericles Lewis, Cliff Mak, Venkat Mani, Jeffrey Masten, Meredith McGill, Madhavi Menon, D. A. Miller, Monica Miller, Mario Ortiz-Robles, Andrew Parker, Jessica Pressman, Leah Price, Eileen Reeves, Effie Rentzou, Kelly Rich, Bruce Robbins, Victoria Rosner, Dianne Sadoff, Jonah Siegel, Scott Straus, Philip Tsang, Stephen Twilley, Aarthi Vadde, Judith Vichniac, Christy Wampole, Susanne Wofford, and Carolyn Williams. For enriching and testing my examples, my thanks to everyone, and also to the readers, hosts, and audiences at the institutions at which I presented my work in progress. I also want to thank the two anonymous readers solicited by Columbia University Press. Many aspects of the book’s argument were improved and refined substantially in response to their exceptionally detailed reports.

Special thanks is due to my coeditors at Literature Now, Matthew Hart and David James, who have been great collaborators and keen supporters of this project. Philip Leventhal at Columbia University Press has expertly and warmly led the project through every stage, and I am very grateful to him for his support of my work. I am also very glad to thank Whitney Johnson for helping me navigate the world of copyright permissions, and Patti Bower and Marisa Pagano for editing and marketing my book on behalf of the Press. Several research assistants and former students have located books, gathered statistics, and translated editions over the years, including Thom Dancer, Octavio Gonzalez, Taryn Okuma, Tarina Quarishi, Jennifer Raterman, and Nami Shin. My sincere thanks to them for their hard work, their suggestions, and their patience.

I am grateful, as always, to my parents, Daniel and Judith Walkowitz, for their love and intellectual example, and to my extended family, Robert Oaks, Sarah Turner, Harriet Turner, Jamie Zelermyer, Karen Zelermyer, and Sarah Zelermyer-Diaz. This book is dedicated to Henry, with whom it is a joy to share so many projects, and to our daughter Lucy, who is a pleasure to acknowledge at every opportunity.

INTRODUCTION

Theory of World Literature Now

Theresa would read the originals and I would read the translations and the translations would become the originals as we read.

—Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

THE LOCATION OF LITERATURE

There is nothing easier and nothing more contemporary than translation. Nothing easier because all you have to do is press that translate button at the top of your Internet browser. Go ahead. Appuyez dès maintenant. There’s nothing more contemporary because Google and Google Translate seem to go hand in hand. It’s hard to imagine the immediate gratifications of the digital age without the immediate gratifications of digital translation: new words, in a new language, at your service. Translation saturates our everyday culture of reading, writing, and viewing. Whether you’re searching the Internet or streaming a video on Netflix, languages seem to be readily available and more or less interchangeable. Films and books, too, are saturated by translation, and indeed the lines between established and emergent media are not so clear. Consider that many books are released—or as we say, delivered—not only in print, as clothbound or paperback editions, but also in electronic files as DVD, MP3, or Kindle editions.¹ Pages can be heard or swiped as well as turned, and expanding formats redouble the impression of proliferating originals, even in a single language.²

But many books do not appear at first only in a single language. Instead, they appear simultaneously or nearly simultaneously in multiple languages. They start as world literature. Of course, long before the twenty-first century there were literary works that traveled from their first language into multiple languages, geographies, and national editions. Yet these travels were relatively slow and initially confined to regional distribution. Take several well-known examples. The international bestseller Don Quixote, famous for its exceptionally fast absorption into many language systems, took fifty-one years, from 1605 to 1656, to find its way from Spanish into five national languages; and it was only in 1769 that the novel was published outside of Western Europe.³ The Pilgrim’s Progress, first published in 1678, has been translated from English into more than two hundred languages, including eighty African languages, but it began its migration beyond Europe and the North Atlantic in 1835.⁴ The Communist Manifesto’s Swedish, English, Russian, Serbian, and French editions followed the 1848 German edition within a speedy twenty-four years; yet the first edition printed in a non-European language was the Japanese translation, published in 1904.⁵ Many of the most popular novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, published before the era of robust international copyright, were translated within a few weeks or months, sometimes appearing in competing editions in the same language.⁶ However, those novels generally circulated within Europe. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, one of the most successful novels of the early eighteenth century, was published in English in 1719 and by the end of 1720 had appeared in German, French, and Dutch.⁷ But it arrived in Japanese, translated through a Dutch edition, in 1857.⁸

The translation and circulation of literature today is historically unprecedented once we consider how quickly books enter various national markets, small and large, across several continents. While I discuss the translation of several genres of literature, including poetry and digital art, my account of translation focuses on the novel because the novel is the most international genre, measured by worldwide translation, and because the novel today solicits as well as incorporates translation, in substantial ways.⁹ Contemporary novels enter new markets with exceptional speed. By enter, I mean that they are published in different editions in the same language (Australian, U.K., U.S., British, and South African English; or, Argentinean and Iberian Spanish) and in different editions in different languages (French, Mandarin, and Hebrew). Examples from the past decade are telling. Between July and December of 2005, the phenomenally successful sixth installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, appeared in fifteen languages, including Vietnamese, Afrikaans, and Estonian.¹⁰ And even more recently: between February and December 2013, J. M. Coetzee’s Childhood of Jesus was published on five continents in nine languages, including Chinese, Polish, and two versions of Portuguese.¹¹ To be sure, the circulation and reception of Coetzee’s book has been different from the circulation and reception of Rowling’s, and that’s to be expected. Rowling’s character-rich fantasy, marketed through films, merchandise, and worldwide distribution events, sold a record number of copies; Coetzee’s slow-moving allegory prompted speculation about a third Booker Prize.¹²

Yet there are two surprises. First, Childhood appeared in translation faster than Harry Potter did. In fact, Coetzee’s novel initially appeared in Dutch, though Coetzee, born in South Africa and now living in Australia, composes his works in English. Piracy concerns delayed the initial translation of Rowling’s novel by two months, whereas Coetzee’s novel could be translated, as it were, before it was published in the original.¹³ Global demand for the Harry Potter novels—fans were clamoring to produce their own unofficial (and illegal) translations—actually slowed global distribution. The second surprise: global demand drives translation only up to a point. The language of Coetzee’s first edition can be explained personally as well as commercially. Coetzee has an ongoing relationship with his Dutch translator; he was raised speaking Afrikaans (closely related to Dutch), and he has translated several works of Dutch poetry and prose into English.¹⁴ And as the story of Robinson Crusoe’s circulation reminds us, there is a long and distinguished history of English-language novels traveling the world as Dutch books.¹⁵

Paying homage to the past, many novels do not simply appear in translation. They have been written for translation from the start. Adapting a phrase for artworks produced for the computer (born digital), I call these novels born translated.¹⁶ Like born-digital literature, which is made on or for the computer, born-translated literature approaches translation as medium and origin rather than as afterthought.¹⁷ Translation is not secondary or incidental to these works. It is a condition of their production. Globalization bears on all writers working in English today. However, it bears on them differently. Some works of fiction are sure to be translated. Others hope to achieve it. Some novelists are closely tied to the mass market, some to prestige cultures, and others to avant-garde communities. But even those novelists who don’t plan on translation participate in a literary system attuned to multiple formats, media, and languages. Born-translated novels approach this system opportunistically.

How does translation shape the narrative structure of the contemporary novel?¹⁸ To begin, we can observe that Coetzee’s Childhood is born translated in at least two ways: it appeared first in Dutch, and it pretends to take place in Spanish.¹⁹ For its principal characters, Simón and David, English is a foreign language. David, a young boy, recites a stanza from a German song, but both he and Simón mistake the source of the lyrics. "What does it mean, Wer reitet so? David asks.²⁰ I don’t know. I don’t speak English," Simón replies. He doesn’t speak German either.²¹ It turns out that you need to have at least a passing acquaintance with a language in order to recognize it as the one you are missing. Simón lacks even that little bit, and thus Coetzee imagines a world in which English is so distant, or so insignificant, that it can be confused with a neighboring tongue.

In born-translated novels, translation functions as a thematic, structural, conceptual, and sometimes even typographical device. These works are written for translation, in the hope of being translated, but they are also often written as translations, pretending to take place in a language other than the one in which they have, in fact, been composed. Sometimes they present themselves as fake or fictional editions: subsequent versions (in English) of an original text (in some other language), which doesn’t really exist. They are also frequently written from translation. Pointing backward as well as forward, they present translation as a spur to literary innovation, including their own. Coetzee makes this point by incorporating a novel whose actual translation was crucial to the development of anglophone fiction. Simón is reading a version of Don Quixote. Cervantes’s work is itself a fake translation, from Arabic into Spanish, whose four-hundred-year absorption into many languages has shaped the writing of subsequent novels throughout the world. By adopting some of the thematic features of Don Quixote, Childhood of Jesus imitates its content and structure—as well as its reception.

In Coetzee’s imitation of Don Quixote, he attributes authorship not to Cervantes but to Señor Benengeli, the fictional author of the fictional Arabic original. He thus also imitates Jorge Luis Borges’s story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (1939). According to Borges’s fiction, presented as a posthumous appreciation, Menard was an underappreciated French writer who created new chapters of Don Quixote by producing words that coincide perfectly with the words in Cervantes’s novel.²² Claiming that Menard’s chapters were verbally identical but nevertheless unique, the story’s narrator presents repetition as a strategy of invention and celebrates the creative energies of foreign readers.²³ With tongue-in-cheek, Borges seems to applaud the anachronism of Menard’s project, producing a seventeenth-century Spanish novel in twentieth-century France, and seems to suggest that changing the context, placing the same words in a new time and place, can be a way of changing the work. Embracing this tradition, Coetzee animates the rich conceptual history of translation. Moreover, he shows that his Australian novel is indebted, fictionally as well as literally, to translation’s past and to the literatures of Argentina and Spain. And of course this is not Coetzee’s debt alone, since Spanish literature of the Golden Age was exported internationally before its English counterpart. Shakespeare probably read Cervantes, but Cervantes is unlikely to have read Shakespeare.²⁴ Coetzee uses Spanish to remind us that English has not always been the principal medium of literary circulation and that Spanish remains today, in the wake of its own empire, a source of many national literatures. Coetzee’s English-language novel activates the histories of Spanish, which has functioned variously and sometimes antagonistically as a language of colonialism, utopian aspiration, exile, migration, and European lingua franca.²⁵

As Coetzee’s novel shows, then, there is nothing older than translation. Translation is the engine rather than the caboose of literary history. Considering for a moment only the history of literature in English, there would be no Hamlet, no Pilgrim’s Progress, no Absalom, Absalom!, and no Mrs. Dalloway without it.²⁶ Yet translation is contemporary because it allows us to consider that the work we are reading includes subsequent editions as well as previous ones. Encountered on the page, translation announces that the work is still arriving: we have before us a language on its way from somewhere else—literature produced for other readers. That is translation’s paradox: it is contemporary, above all, because it is historical. In translation, literature has a past as well as a future. While many books produced today seek to entice or accommodate translation, aiming to increase their audiences and the market-share of their publishers, born-translated works are notable because they highlight the effects of circulation on production. Not only are they quickly and widely translated, they are also engaged in thinking about that process. They increase translation’s visibility, both historically and proleptically: they are trying to be translated, but in important ways they are also trying to keep being translated. They find ways to register their debts to translation even as they travel into additional languages. Most of all, whether or not they manage to circulate globally, today’s born-translated works block readers from being native readers, those who assume that the book they are holding was written for them or that the language they are encountering is, in some proprietary or intrinsic way, theirs.²⁷ Refusing to match language to geography, many contemporary works will seem to occupy more than one place, to be produced in more than one language, or to address multiple audiences at the same time. They build translation into their form.

Whereas Coetzee’s literary fictions approach translation explicitly, asking readers to imagine English-language novels that began in Spanish, Portuguese, Afrikaans, and German, other writers approach translation conceptually and sometimes fantastically. Continuing with English-language examples for the moment, we can observe the enormous range of approaches by looking at the genre fiction of British novelist China Miéville and the visual writing of U.S. novelist Walter Mosley. Miéville is unusual because he uses the stock devices of science fiction, fantasy, and police procedural to raise complex questions about the politics of language.²⁸ His most substantial engagement with translation is The City, The City (2009), in which two nations share the same territorial space, and citizenship is a matter of cultural rather than corporeal topography. Where you are legally, in the book’s logic, depends on how you walk, what you wear, how you speak, what you acknowledge, and what passport you hold. Every place is thus two places, both the city and the city, though most of the inhabitants have learned to live as if there were only one. The novel suggests that political disavowal is managed in part by linguistic disavowal, and thus the fiction of homogeneity is expressed through heterogeneous syntax. Instead of altering the novel’s diction to incorporate the sounds or even the vocabulary of two languages, a more typical way to represent multilingualism, Miéville represents a binational society by creating a bifurcated sentence structure. Accidentally seeing a woman who is not a citizen of his country, the narrator "looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the façades of the nearby and local GunterStrász. …²⁹ Later he describes the experience of standing in a near-deserted part [of his own city] … surrounded by a busy unheard throng."³⁰ Only unhearing and unseeing, Miéville suggests, allows the city to appear as one. Making foreignness audible and visible, the novel generates alternatives to the experience of native reading.

Walter Mosley, best known as the author of the hugely successful and widely translated Easy Rawlins mysteries, launched by Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990, has produced more than thirty-seven books in several genres, including memoir and science fiction in addition to detective fiction. Devil in a Blue Dress does not reflect on translation and in fact incorporates variations in diction and vernacular dialogue, which can make translation difficult. But in an ongoing series of drawings that is also a series of writings, subsumed under the heading of Alien Script, Mosley has extended his exploration of subterranean and counterfactual worlds to the exploration of subterranean and counterfactual languages. The images can be understood both as pictures and as words (figures 0.1 and 0.2).

The works are not individually titled. All are part of the collective, Alien Script. A script can be a writing system, as in Roman or Cyrillic script, and it can also refer to cinematic or theatrical instructions, as in a film or play script. Mosley has produced dozens of these sheets, and continues to produce them, and thus the work is an open series. The colors, shapes, and patterns vary, but all of them are made on lined notebook paper. The lines create the structure and retain the impression of writing generated by hand.

FIGURE 0.1 Image from Walter Mosley, Alien Script.

Reprinted by permission of Walter Mosley and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.

FIGURE 0.2 Image from Walter Mosley, Alien Script.

Reprinted by permission of Walter Mosley and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.

Mosley’s scripts seem alien in a variety of ways: the kinetic forms are uncanny; they are almost but not quite human bodies, which seem to be wearing something like human clothing. They are also alien because they are, literally, outside the bounds: under, over, and on top of the lines. Finally, they are alien because they thwart our ability to read them, or even to isolate their constituent parts. Are we looking at letters? Hieroglyphs? Characters? What is the alphabet from which this writing has been made? This sense of alien extends beyond Mosley’s work: illegible and unrecognizable, writing becomes alien when readers project their own estrangement onto the pages. Unknown marks or letters will seem to block expressivity. Yet Mosley’s Script also affirms an infinite expressivity: there is always another pattern, another color, and another shape. The work’s futurity is suggested by a recent exhibit of the drawings, in which curator Lydie Diakhaté placed eighteen of the Alien Script pages next to nine iterations, in different languages, of the first paragraph of Devil in a Blue Dress.³¹ For most viewers, at least one of those languages was alien, and thus the scripts could serve as allegories or illustrations for the texts. But the scripts also assert their difference from the texts: while the paragraphs register a world system of literatures and the commercial logic of international publishing, the alien scripts—hand-made and irreducible to place or territory—aspire to new systems. While the pages evoke various traditions in dance, fabric, typography, and painting, their insouciant forms, at once overflowing and extracted, retro and sci-fi, hint at moorings to come.

ENGLISH LAST

Embracing fake translation, genre fiction, and visual media, Coetzee, Miéville, and Mosley are deploying aesthetic strategies that are used by writers in many other languages. It is not only—or even primarily—English-language novels that address themselves to multiple audiences. In fact, in the invention of born-translated fiction, anglophone writers are the followers, not the leaders. This makes sense when we consider that anglophone works can succeed without being translated. English is the dominant language of commerce and technology, at least for the moment, and it has the greatest number of readers, once we include second- and third- as well as first-language users throughout the world.³² Those who write in English can therefore expect their works to be published in the original and to reach many audiences in English-language editions. But writers in smaller languages, meaning languages for which there are fewer readers and publishers, have had to depend on translation for survival. Translation into English and into other major languages such as French and Spanish has been for some a condition of publication and for many a path to translation into subsequent national editions. Those who publish in major languages also have better access to lucrative international prizes.³³

Some writers have tried to mitigate the need for translation by choosing to write in a dominant language, if they can. We could call this strategy preemptive translation. This is in some ways an old strategy. Late Medieval and early modern European writers often circulated their work both in Latin and in vernacular languages in order to reach secular as well as clerical audiences. A language of commerce and international exchange, read and sometimes spoken across many geographies, Latin allowed merchants and scholars to communicate without having to manage local idioms.³⁴ Eleventh-century Iranian philosophers wrote not in Persian but in Arabic, while Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals used Chinese for nearly one thousand years.³⁵ From the perspective of the past, it is in some ways a misnomer to call this practice translation or even preemptive translation since it is a relatively recent assumption that one’s writing language and one’s speaking language would naturally be the same. Put another way, writing in Latin while speaking French is only a species of translation, or second-language use, if writing in French is the norm.

For most of literary history, written languages such as Greek, Latin, and Arabic have diverged from spoken languages, which were used for other purposes. People who could write—very few people—would have had a first language for writing and a first language for speaking. Periodically, it has seemed important for writers to align these two uses of language. Dante was unusual in his time because he chose to write an epic in Italian rather than Latin. Preemptive translation, or the division of writing and speaking languages, was the expectation until the late eighteenth century, which inaugurates the era of national languages and literary traditions. We are still part of that era. The expectation that the language of writing will match the language of speech remains dominant. We can tell that this is so because writing in a second language has its own special name, translingual writing.³⁶ This distinction between first- and second-language writing is continuous with the Romantic distinction between native and foreign languages. Early-nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher famously referred to writing in a second language as a species of translation because he believed that writing in the original could take place only in one’s own tongue.³⁷

We can find many examples of preemptive translation in the twenty-first century. In 2004, contemporary novelist Elif Shafak, who lives in both Istanbul and London, shifted from writing novels in her first language, Turkish, to writing them in her second language, English. Shafak follows a path—and a rationale—traveled by mid-twentieth-century writer Vladimir Nabokov, who composed his early novels in Russian but began producing novels in English, starting with Lolita, so he could publish in New York.³⁸ Novelist and poet Jaime Manrique, who was born in Colombia but has lived in the United States since 1980, publishes his novels in English and his poetry in Spanish. He calls English his public language.³⁹ English is the language in which he feels comfortable writing for and about public conversation, whereas Spanish is his language of intimacy. Spanish is hardly a minor tongue, but dominance is relative. Consider the case of Albanian writer and journalist Gazmend Kapllani, who composes his books in Greek, a language he learned only as an adult. Kapllani’s works have subsequently appeared in Danish, English, French, and Polish. Long based in Athens but now living in Boston, Kapllani has said that he may start writing in English.⁴⁰ Manrique’s and Kapllani’s choices reflect a mix of political exigency, aesthetic preference, and economic opportunity. Publishing in two languages concurrently, Manrique’s practice is reminiscent of the strategies developed by the early-twentieth-century Indian writer Premchand (the pseudonym of Dhanpat Rai Srivastava), who sought to evade British colonial censors by producing each of his works in two original languages, Hindi and Urdu.⁴¹

Sometimes, preemptive translation takes place at the moment of publication rather than at the moment of composition. Milan Kundera, who wrote many of his best-known novels in Czech, published them first in French and has in recent years claimed that he is in fact a French writer.⁴² The translations have come to shape the compositions: Kundera has used the French editions to update the Czech originals.⁴³ Elena Botchorichvili, a Georgian writer who lives in Montreal, also publishes her novels in French even though she writes them in Russian. Six of Botchorichvili’s books appeared in French and several other languages before they appeared in their original language.⁴⁴ Bernardo Atxaga writes his novels in Basque and self-translates them into Spanish; most of the subsequent translations are based on the Spanish editions.

Anglophone writers who are located outside of the largest centers of publishing, New York and London, have had to translate too. Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o famously chose to publish his novels first in Gikuyu, but he has also published them, self-translated, in English. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which features a smattering of Igbo terms, required a glossary when it was published in the London-based Heinemann series in 1962, while several paragraphs of Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, first published in South Africa in 1977, were translated from Afrikaans into English for the U.K. edition.⁴⁵ Non-anglophone languages that are well known or at least familiar to anglophone readers in regional contexts—consider the use of many Spanish, Yiddish, and French words in U.S. writing, for example—often require translation or explication when they appear in anglophone books published outside those regions. And it is not only words from other languages but also words from regional or colonial versions of languages that travel uneasily within dominant languages. The title of Ferdinand Oyono’s francophone African novel Une vie de boy, first published in 1956, makes use of an English word (boy) that operates differently in French than it does in English.⁴⁶ In English editions of the book, the so-called English word has had to be translated.⁴⁷

While some novelists expand their audiences by publishing their books in second languages or by standardizing their vocabulary, others have found ways to accommodate translation within global languages such as Spanish and French and also within regional languages such as Turkish and Japanese. Like Coetzee, Miéville, and Mosley, many build translation into the form of their works, emphasizing translation’s history and ongoing relevance while insisting that a novel can belong to more than one language. They are not preempting translation so much as courting it. Sometimes they do a bit of both. For example, Nancy Huston, a Calgary-born writer who has lived in Paris for the past forty years, writes novels and essays in French and then writes them in English. She publishes her works in both languages, and others have translated her work into many additional languages. Like Kundera, Huston uses her own translations to revise the originals, and, like Samuel Beckett, who produced many of his own works in English and French, she regards both versions as original texts. In 1993 she won an award for fiction in French for a novel she wrote first in English. Huston thus preempts translation because she operates both as author and as translator. But she also treats translation as a species of production, as when she argues that her award-winning book should be understood as an original creation.⁴⁸ In addition, some of Huston’s works take translation as a principal concern. The English version of the nonfiction book Losing North (2002), for example, includes an essay about the difficulty of translating idioms such as the one that constitutes the book’s title.⁴⁹

The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, whose work has been widely translated and who is also an accomplished translator of U.S. fiction, has taken a somewhat different tack: using his second language to create a new kind of first language. To be clear: Murakami submits his manuscripts to his publisher in Japanese, and his novels first appear in that language. But from the start of his career he has deployed translation as a method of composition, in a variety of ways. First, the most literal way: he has claimed that he found his style in Japanese by writing pages first in English and then translating them into Japanese.⁵⁰ By starting in English, he sought to avoid the conventional diction and syntax of Japanese literature. In this sense, Murakami’s project is similar to Huston’s and indeed to Beckett’s, except